I am still commenting on Kafka’s Diary entry I quoted a couple of days ago.
What is lost in Kafka’s writing is the particularity of his despair. Yet even as language fails to express its concreteness, literature begins. Whence the mercy and the surplus: as he enters literature, Kafka is given over to the experience of language without end. Sentence must follow sentence; one can never write sufficiently clearly; more images are required, more embellishments.
How to escape this apparently infinite task? One can rejoice in the power of writing, in the virtuosity of an authorship who will present the world with delights, flashing the glory of the world back to itself. There is the satisfaction of being praised by the critics and loved by one’s readers, of anticipating one’s place in the pantheon of great writers; one will have contributed to the great work of culture, illuminating and educating humankind. But what of those who are no so easily pleased – for whom culture is always a step behind and the critic never quite up-to-date in his tastes? What of the avant-garde writer who attempts to plunge the literary work into a kind of refusal of culture, turning it into an obelisk without meaning?
The unfortunate lesson: literature must mean if it is to be literature – the text cannot become an obdurate thing, closed upon itself, it depends for its life on its readers and therefore upon the meaning its readers will give it. The other temptation is to replace pages full of writing with the blank page, to refuse to work, running the work into silence. Yet the page itself has significance; it belongs to literary meaning. Culture has triumphed as it must; the book must go out to meet its audience, the author whether happy or unhappy must bathe in the reflected light of the work (this does not mean that there might not be another triumph awaiting the book, just that book cannot withold itself from the work of the world).
The literary writer, born of literature, cannot escape it; for the writer, there is no death. The literary writer wanders through language, Blanchot argues, as Kafka’s Gracchus wanders through the world. Gracchus a great hunter of the Black Forest fell and bled to death in a ravine; somehow the ship of death which was supposed to carry him away took a wrong turn. Gracchus, who had stretched himself out on the planking of the ship, happy to die as he had been happy to live sang out to the mountains, but he was not taken to the other shore. Before he came on board the ship, he had thrown away his hunting rifle and had slipped into the funeral shroud as happily as a young girl into her wedding dress. He lay down and waited. ‘Then’, Kafka writes, ‘the disaster happened’.
Blanchot, remembering this phrase, comments:
This disaster is the impossibility of death, it is the mockery thrown on all humankind’s great subterfuges, night, nothingness, silence. There is no end, there is no possibility of being done with the day, with the meaning of things, with hope: such is the truth that Western man has made a symbol of felicity, and has tried to make bearable by focusing on its positive side, that of immortality, of an afterlife that would compensate for life. But this afterlife is our actual life.
No death, no end; in this case, Kafka is condemned to the order of meaning and can never reach the immediacy of anguish. Language has run away with him; literature has captured this author whose notebooks are full of story-scraps commenced and then abandoned and whose writing rarely finds a form that satisfies him. What good is writing?, asks Kafka; but this is an idle question: he documents at length the harm writing does him and others, yet he writes. He complains of that great rarefaction which has left him unable to desire anything other to write, and yet his writing disappoints him – he never has enough time, more: he never has the courage to make time enough.
There is his job, of course, his life at the Workers’ Accident Insurance Institute for the Kingdom of Bohemia in Prague to which he will send a note saying he will be late on account of a dizzy spell the night after he writes ‘The Judgement’. Then there is his family, his engagements … But then when he finally obtains leave, when he has time to write, he can produce nothing which satisfies him. Futility; there is no escape from the demand of writing, of literature. Kafka knows this, which is why he will sometimes dream of emigrating to Palestine and giving up writing for a new life of manual labour, of devoting himself to his studies of Hebrew and Italian. But all of this is a sign of bad conscience. Is it Kafka’s alone? Or is it ours, too, as we read his life and work as pure anguish, as misery without joy, as neurosis? For Kafka’s disaster – the disaster of a life lived in disappointment – is a mirror of our own as we try to escape the order of meaning, of light, of a day without end. The fascination with Kafka’s life – as well as the lives, happy and unhappy, of the authors we read in biographies – is a way of sidestepping our own disaster.
Our disaster? Do we not live from the world, as Levinas will put it, from fine spectacles and good food, enjoying the air and our good health? It is true that for the most part we enjoy the world and its glories; we rejoice in the present passing, in the happiness of living alongside others. Yet there is a menace concealed in apparent joy of this life. Levinas will argue that the obscure threat of the sheer ‘il y a’, the there is of existence weighs upon us. This is what he claims vouchsafes itself to us in the experience of physical pain, which can no longer, for him, be understood simply in terms of an absence of enjoyment. It has its own force; it testifies to a lingering sense of disquietude in human life, the sense that existence is a burden and that this burden is unbearable. Is it this Blanchot recalls when he claims that we compensate the disappointments of this life with the dream of an afterlife? ‘But this afterlife is our actual life’, writes Blanchot. The experience of pain bears witness not to the death which will bring suffering to an end, but to a dying which will not come to term: to an instant that cannot be determined and placed.
Existence is interminable, it is nothing but an indeterminacy; we do not know if we are excluded from it (which is why we search vainly in it for something solid to hold onto) or whether we are forever imprisoned in it (and so we turn desperately toward the outside). This existence is an exile in the fullest sense: we are not there, we are elsewhere, and we will never stop being there.
No escape. Nothing endures such that we can hold on to it; the great day of the world, the ongoing production of meaning is a mockery of the one who strives to secure a place for herself; everything happens, but it is as though nothing has happened since the instant is too fleeting, joy too temporary, and there is always a rush of deadlines that are barely possible to keep. Signs circulate; chatter is everywhere; Heidegger will complain that empty curiosity, a ‘passing the word along’ characterises the chatter of Das Man, the ‘they’: no one talks of what really concerns them. But it is not Blanchot’s aim, like Heidegger, to turn each to the quest for authenticity, to reclaim oneself in one’s confrontation with death, that possibility which spells the impossibility-of-Dasein. In one sense it is of the order of possibility that we are tired – of existence as the temporal transcendence that opens the world to us as project. In another, it is sense of a kind of impossibility of possibility – of a freezing or suspension of time that prevents the same transcendence. It is the latter which intimates itself in the experience of physical suffering.
No doubt, where it is a matter of a measured suffering, it is still endured, still, of course, suffered, but also brought back into our grasp and assumed, recaptured and even comprehended in the patience we become in the face of it. But it can also lose this measure; it is even of its essence to be always already beyond measure. Suffering is suffering when one can no longer suffer it, and when, because of this non-power, one cannot cease suffering it. A singular situation. Time is as though arrested, merged with its interval. There, the present is without end, separated from every other present by an inexhaustible and empty infinite, the very infinite of suffering, and thus dispossessed of any future: a present without end and yet impossibility a present.
The arrested present cannot be transcended. One cannot flee upstream from this moment into the future, transcending it by incorporating it into our project. Here, transcendence is explicitly linked to the order of possibility – to what a human being can achieve for itself. Suffering, then, is the interruption of this capacity. It entails the impossibility of possibility. It is the correlate, therefore, of Gracchus’s impossible death. At the same time, the possibility of possibility is also suffered: the dimension which offers hope, transcendence, a future, is also unbearable.
‘We are not there, we are elsewhere, and we will never stop being there’, Blanchot writes: there is an oscillation between these dual experiences of existence. There are two kinds of suffering, two ways in which we experience our inability to escape. What, then, of Kafka? On the one hand, the order of possibility is unbearable: he cannot express his suffering in a universal language. But language must be universal; one cannot escape the light of meaning. On the other hand, suffering itself is unbearable; it belongs to the side of impossibility, where nothing can be done (this is why writing is experienced as a ‘merciful surplus of strength’). The universal, the possible, the everyday are all linked to an unbearable absence of determination, an impersonal streaming. But this absence is also experienced in the very concreteness of suffering; suffering too, as Levinas argues, is likewise impersonal, and this is its horror. So there is no escape for Kafka; literature and life defeat him, each in a different way. But no so much that he can find momentary solace in literature in his living, his work and his relationship with his family, and in life as he writes, and finds writing impossible.
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